Backward masking and the central performance drop

Abstract

Kehrer [Spatial Vision 2 (1987) 247] found that texture discrimination performance sometimes peaks in the parafovea rather than at the fovea, and he referred to this phenomenon as the central performance drop (CPD). Kehrer used a backward mask to limit performance and Morikawa [Vision Res. 40 (2000) 3517] argued that in some cases the temporal aspects of the backward mask may be critical to the emergence of the CPD. In one experiment Morikawa showed that the CPD does not emerge when a simultaneous noise-mask (different from the mask used by Kehrer) is used to limit performance. In another experiment Morikawa showed that unmasked texture displays comprising short lines do not elicit the CPD. In both cases, changes in the temporal aspects of the texture displays were accompanied by changes in the spatial structure of the mask or stimulus. For the spatio-temporal theory of the CPD to be sustained one would have to show that noise masks elicit a CPD when used as backward masks and that the short-line textures elicit a CPD when followed by backward masks. Our evidence provides little if any support for either of these predictions. Furthermore, an analysis of a simple filter-rectify-filter model of texture segmentation shows that a greatly attenuated CPD is to be expected when a noise mask is used as a source of spatial noise.